Besides its major factories, the growing City of Bushnell began building all the amenities needed to support a hustling, bustling town in the mid 1800s. The first hotel, built in 1855, was the American House on East Hurst Street.
The Bushnell House stood on East Main and East Barnes in 1878. It was a larger frame building with a full front porch. The Hendee House was in the center of the 300 block of West Main. The building was still changing hands as late as 1979.
It was known to be one of the best hotels between Galesburg and Quincy. Rooms were $2 per day.
The Hendee House was eventually bought and turned into the Alexander, then the New Alexander Hotel. The new hotel was quite modern for the time, having 60 guest rooms, with 10 rooms that had working toilets. Every room had hot and cold running water, a telephone, steam heat and an electric light. L.H. Korn Jr. was in charge of the hotel cafe, and it was said that it would be a credit to any city. The customer could get practically anything he or she wanted to eat, regardless of the season.
History was rich concerning the Bushnell Hotel. It is reported Carl Sandburg’s parents met there when she worked as a chambermaid, and his father came to town as a railroad employee. Later, during the glory days of the Bushnell horse shows in the early 1900s, Frank James, brother to famous outlaw Jesse James, was a guest. Frank, in his 70s then, served as a starter for the races at the horse shows.
Rates were then $1 per day, and the best meal available was 75 cents. The hotel was so busy that it became necessary to build an addition on the back of the building to house the visitors from out-of-town coming to the horse shows, which could bring in groups as large as 15,000 people.
The hotel was a common stopping place for traveling salesmen throughout the years. By the year 1914, each room had a bathroom, but only the new addition had running water. Bellboys supplied pitchers of hot water to the guests without running water. For safety purposes, each room had a rope under a window for a fire escape.
Three members of Bushnell’s Kern family – Frank, John and Mary – purchased the hotel after Alexander died in 1909. They remodeled it in 1915 and ran it for many years until the Kern estate sold it to Wilmer Pribble in 1955. Pribble in turn sold it to Leo and Marie Bricker in 1959.
By that time, trends had changed a bit. It was more common to have a number of permanent residents besides the owners, who kept an apartment in one wing. The Brickers, apparently being multi-taskers, were also in charge of the Bushnell Police answering service at the time. In 1971, the hotel sold again after Mrs. Bricker's husband died. Dennis Larson bought the hotel, and he was fascinated by its rich construction material, a marble staircase and antique woodwork.
But Larson died less than two years later. Dale Miller bought the hotel from the Larson estate, but only kept it open a short while. Lyle Young became owner then, but part of the rear of the three-story building collapsed. He sold the building to Gene Hoyle, who in 1979 demolished most of it, then all of it.
A Note from the Writer The Bushnell Hotel during the 1950s-1960s, maybe even in the 1970s, allowed the photography studio “Olan Mills” to use one of their large rooms for portraits.
The Douglas kids, as well as probably most of the kids in Bushnell, were taken to the Bushnell Hotel in their Sunday best-white shirts and ties, dresses, hair slicked back. I personally remember watching hotel guests descend the large staircase.
